4000 Miles!

I noticed last night on the way home from work that I have put 4000 all electric miles on the Saturn since its inaguaral commute back in March/April of '07. I thought I would share my observations after driving the car for the past 8 months. First off, I drive it just about every day. During the workweek I'm able to drive up to a Park and Ride that is 15 miles from my house and vanpool the remaining 35 miles up to work. You'd be surprised how rare of an occasion it is that I need to drive all of the way up there myself, since I've owned the car I think it has been less than 5 times. On those occassions I've taken a gas powered car and been stuck in traffic far too long!

It has been a long time since I last filled up a car with gas, in fact months. My wife drives our gas-powered car and usually fills it up every couple weeks. One thing we've noticed is that we need to fill up our gas-powered cars far less as well since we usually use the electric car on weekends for all of our errands around time. This morning (Saturday) we took it the zoo, and then over to get some lunch in downtown Tacoma and put about 20 gas-free miles on it. It is incredible how quickly those miles add up.

Overall, I really have enjoyed the car. It is reliable, fun to drive, and fun to show off when people realize there really is no gas engine inside. I think the main downside is that my battery pack range is right at the edge of my 30 mile commute, especially as it starts getting colder. This means that I usually take it pretty slow to conserve electricity and make sure I can make it the full commute. Other than that, no complaints for the first 4000 miles, just a happy electric car driver.

Chance to see electric vehicles in Tacoma

For those readers that live near Tacoma you may want to check out the Washington State Recycling Association/LeMay Automobile Museum EVent going on Sept. 21st from 5-9 p.m. The address for the event is 325 152nd St E Tacoma, WA. I'm hoping that I can make it down with my Electrc Saturn. There is supposed to be more information for this event posted here: http://www.wsra.net/ shortly.

How much does it cost to drive an Electric Car?

I often am asked how much it costs me to charge my electric car and how that compares to a gasoline powered car. There is no question that the electricity required for my 30 mile commute costs much less than the gasoline required for the same commute. This is largely because an electric vehicle is much more efficient than a gasoline vehicle, but also because electricity in the Pacific Northwest is not nearly as volatile as gasoline prices. Using my latest bill from Tacoma Power I see that our electric rates are .03 cents per KH for consumption and .03 center per KH for delivery. I have no idea why they break the bill up like that, I don't think I'd feel any better if they charged me $1.00 gallon for milk and $1.00 for delivery to the grocery store, but oh well, I'm sure there is a great reason for it. I know from a recent cool device I purchased for $20 called the "Kill-o-watt" how much electricity it takes to charge the car on a daily basis. Using the "Kill-o-watt" which plugs in to your wall, and then allows a device to plug in to it, and measures the current passing through I know that it takes 14 KWH of electricity to charge the Electrc Saturn. So, my total daily cost is $0.84 for the 30 mile round trip. Hmm, now lets compare that to what I got in my 1996 Plymouth Voyager which gets 22 miles to the gallon. 22 miles to the gallon, at $3.50 per gallon (yes I know that regular has dropped below that, but who believes it will stay there long? And I'm a physicist so I believe in liberal rounding) I find that the same trip cost me $4.76 per day. So, I have a savings of $3.92 per day when driving my electric vehicle. Wow, not bad!! Since I drive at least 30 miles per day 6 days a week (usually I drive between 30 and 40 on Sat/Sun combined) I find that my weekly savings is: $23.52.

Is that the last word? No, because I still have to factor in regular battery replacement, but that is still good enough for today, and I'll factor in the batteries when I have a better idea of how long they will last.

How much cleaner is an electric car?

How much cleaner is it to drive an electric car than a gas powered car? That is an important question to ask, since the main reason I started driving electric was to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas production my commute was responsible for producing. How much cleaner an electric car is than a gasoline powered car is highly dependent on how clean the electricity is to produce. This EPA chart shows that using the average "cleanliness" of electricity in the US, electric powered vehicles are about 47% cleaner than gas powered vehicles. However, the State of Washington (where I live) has some of the cleanest electricity in the country because of our reliance on hydropower. So, plugging in the #'s to this EPA "Electricity Cleanliness Calculator" I found that electricity in the Tacoma area code, 98407, is about 2-3 times cleaner than the national average. This means that overall driving an electric car is somewhere between 90 and 120% cleaner than a gasoline powered car. To put this in perspective I can drive my car roughly 300 miles and pollute less than a gas powered car pollutes in 30 miles. Cool!

Electric Commuting!

Well, I'm happy to report that I've been doing my 30 mile round trip commute for the last two weeks in the electric car, now affectionately known as "Electrc" after the vanity plates that I now have on the vehicle. I'm averaging around 55 amp/hours for the total 30 mile round trip. I think I am pushing the pack pretty hard since by the end I'm sitting at roughly 144 volts with no current being drawn. I'm continually looking for a fast/easy on the pack route home, but getting to our house without going up a hill somewhere is pretty tough since Tacoma is built on a bluff. Here's a picture of the car down on the Ruston Way Waterfront:

On the road!

My maiden voyage was a success and there was remarkably little that went wrong on the 46 mile round trip journey from Woodinville to Everett to the SEVA meeting in the newly electrified Saturn. We set off in the car for the 23 mile journey with myself driving, Dave riding co-pilot and the designer of the prototype E-Gauge, Bruce Sherry, driving behind us in case we had technical difficulties. We rolled out on to Woodinville-Duvall road with no problems, accelerating to speed, though I kept it at about 5 miles below the speed limit (according to Bruce) since the speedometer isn't working. There was little need to use the speedometer on the freeway since it was typical stop and go traffic on northbound 405. Using the E-gauge we measured a burn-rate of 2.1 Amp Hours per mile, or 49.7 total Amp hours. I don't have the stats on the T-875, but am guessing we have somewhere around 90 total amp hours available. Since we were well over 50% discharged we plugged in when we reached the SEVA meeting at Pacific Battery. The prospect of waiting 5 hours to get fully charged was thankfully short-lived when the truck that had dibs on the 220 outlet popped the breakers every time it was plugged in. We took over the 220 outlet and had the Saturn charged in about 2 hours. The SEVA meeting was great, we pulled the Saturn in the warehouse and opened the hood and I spent most of the 3 hour meeting explaining the various parts of the car. We then packed things up and headed home, doing around 60 mph all the way home. The only concern was as we headed up a pretty steep hill at about 20 miles in to the return trip and the car slowed down to probably 20 mph as we hit the top and the volts dropped to almost 100 volts. Things rebounded as the road leveled out and we made it back to Dave's house at a pretty good clip.

I'm still not sure whether I'll be able to make it the 30 miles to Federal Way and back, based on this experiment I know the car runs at between 2.1 and 2.6 amps/hour per mile. Based on the slower trip in rush hour to Everett and the theoretical capacity of 90 amp/hours for the battery pack I should have a range of 35 miles. Assuming a 2.6 amp/hour rate I'm looking at exactly 30 miles, so a lot depends on the the terrain, which has a lot of ups and downs between Tacoma and Federal Way. Things are getting close, a couple more tweaks to the engine mount, some cleanup of the wiring, and fixing the speedometer and the car should be ready to go! Things are getting very exciting!

Getting closer...

I just got off of the phone with Dave Cloud this evening and it looks like the car is pretty close to being finished up. He took her on the maiden voyage this afternoon and the overall test was successful. He has a couple of last minute tweaks to make (the amp meter is not working, some scraping on the axle, and there seems to be an overall lack of power). It sounds like the axle and amp meter may be fixable by tomorrow, which would be great since we'd like to drive it up to the SEVA meeting up in Everett tomorrow. The lack of power is expected since we are using a 400 amp curtis controller instead of the custom controller that is not yet finished but that should give us a lot more power once it is installed.

I'm hopeful that the Curtis controller will get us up to freeway speed and that we can successfully make it from Woodinville to Everett and back. If not, it's going to be a long walk home to Tacoma :)